Paige adored her.

"She looks pretty," came the tight voice of Mara's father. A tall, stocky man, he stood with his hands in the pockets of tired suit pants, and iron-hard eyes on the street.

"Whoever set her out did a fine job."

"She always looked pretty," Paige said in defense of Mara. Pale, sometimes. Hassled, sometimes. But pretty." Unable to leave it at that, she spoke with a certain urgency. "She was happy, Mr.

O'Neill.

She had a full life here."

"That why she killed herself?"

"We don't know she did. It may as well have been an accident as suicide."

He grunted. "Same difference." He stared straight ahead. "Not that it matters. She was lost to us long time ago. This never would've happened if she'd done what we said. She'd be alive if she'd stayed back home."

"But then she wouldn't have been a doctor," Paige said, because much as she realized that the man was in pain, she couldn't let his declaration stand. She was a wonderful pediatrician. She loved children, and they loved her. She fought for them. She fought for their parents.

They'll all be here tomorrow.

You'll see."

He looked at her for the first time. "Were you the one told her to go to medical school?"

"Oh, no. She wanted that long before I did."

"R.t VOU got her UD here."

"She got herself up here. All I did was tell her about the opportunity." He grunted and stared at the street again. After a minute he said, "You look like her, y'know. Maybe that was why she liked you. Same dark hair, same size, you could be sisters. Are you married?"

"No."

"Have you ever been?"

"No." Have you ever had children?"

"No."

"Then you're missing as much in life as she was. She tried with that fellow Daniel, but he couldn't take his wife being gone all the time, don't know what man could, and then when she didn't get pregnant, well, what good's a woman like that?"

Paige was beginning to get a drift of what had driven Mara from Eugene.

"Mara wasn't to blame for Daniel's problems. He had a drug habit well before she met him. She thought she could help, but it just didn't work. Same with getting pregnant. Maybe if they'd had more time"

"Time wouldn't have mattered. It was the abortion that did it."

Abortion?" Paige knew nothing about an abortion.

"She didn't tell you? I can understand why.

It isn't every girl who gets pregnant when she's sixteen and then runs off to get rid of the child before her parents have a say in the matter. What she did was murder. Her punishment was not being able to get pregnant again." He made a sputtering sound. "Sad thing is, having babies would have been her salvation. If she'd stayed back home and got married and had kids, she'd have been alive today and we wouldn't have had to spend half our savings flying to her funeral."

At that moment Paige wished they hadn't come.

She wished she had never spoken with Thomas O'Neill. Mostly she wished she had never learned about the abortion. It wasn't that she condemned Mara for itshe could understand the fear a sixteenyear-old must have felt in as intolerant a house as hersbut she wished Mara had told her, herself.

Paige had thought they were best of friends, yet in all the talks they had had about Mara's marriage and its lack of children, about the foster children she had taken in over the years, and the child she would have adopted had she lived, never once had she mentioned an abortion. Nor had she mentioned it in any one of the many, many discussions they had had on the issue as it related to the teenage girls in their care.

Paige was heartbroken to think that there were important things she didn't know about someone she had called a close friend.

Friday morning dawned warm and gray, the air heavy as though with Mara's secrets. Paige found some solace in the fact that the church was packed to overflowing. If ever there was proof of the number of lives Mara had touched and the esteem in which she was held, this was it. Particularly in light of the presence of the family that had never recognized her achievements, Paige felt vindicated on Mara's behalf.

But that small, victorious kernel came and went quickly, buried as deeply in the grief of the day as Mara in the dark hole in the ground on the hillside overlooking town, and before Paige could quite catch her breath, the cemetery was left behind, the lunch at the Tucker Inn for all who cared to come was consumed, and the O'Neills of Eugene, Oregon, were delivered to the airport.

Paige returned to Mara's house, a Victorian with high ceilings, a winding staircase, and a wraparound porch. She wandered from room to room, thinking that Mara had loved lighting the narrow fireplace putting a Christmas tree in the parlor window, having lemonade on the back porch on a warm summer night. The O'Neills had told Paige to sell the house and give the proceeds to charity, and she planned to do that, but not yet. She couldn't pack up and dispose of Mara's life in a day.

She needed time to grieve. She needed time to get used to Mara's absence. She needed time to say good-bye.

She also needed time to find a buyer who would love the place as Mara had. She owed Mara that.

She left the kitchen through a bowed screen door that slapped shut behind her and sank onto the back porch swing, watching the birds dart from tree to tree and feeder to feeder.

There were five feeders that she could see.

She suspected others were hidden in the trees.

Mara had enjoyed nothing more than to sit on that very swing, holding whatever child was in her custody at the moment, whispering tidbits about each bird that flew by.

I'll feed them for you, Paige promised. I'll make sure that whoever buys the house feeds them. They won't be abandoned. It's the least I can do.

Mara would have taken Paige's kitty, no doubt about it. She had loved wild things, weak things, little things. And Paige? Paige wasn't as adventurous. She loved needy things, too, but in a more controlled environment. She thrived on constancy, order, and predictability.

Change unsettled her.

Leaving the swing, she wandered into the yard. The birds flew away.

She stood very still, held her breath, and waited, but they didn't return. She was very much alone.

I'll miss you, Mara, she thought, and started back toward the house, feeling empty and old. The house suddenly seemed it, too. It needed a painting. I'll have it done. The door needed new screening. Easy enough. A shutter had to be replaced by the upper left bedroom window.

No sweat. And by the upper right bedroom the upper right bedroomOh, God . . .

The doorbell rang, distant but distinct.

Grateful for the reprieve, Paige returned to the house. She guessed that a friend might have seen her car and stopped, or that one of the townsfolk who hadn't made the funeral wanted to offer condolences.

The wavy glass panel of the front door revealed a shape that was bulky but not tall.

She opened the door to find that the shape wasn't a single body at all, but a woman holding a child. Neither were locals, she had never seen them before.